Rocky Mountain Review 
of Language and Literature

Volume 67, Number 1 
Spring 2013

Articles

Taking advantage of the periodical press in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Madrid and Seville, José María Blanco y Crespo openly questioned the existing socio-political structures of Spain and critically approached the institutionalized errors of thought and action that had led to the decadence of the nation. Self-exiled after this turbulent period and the subsequent Napoleonic invasion, the renamed Joseph Blanco White continued his journalistic efforts from Great Britain in El Español (1810-1814). The present article traces the development of Blancoâ's critical approach to Spanish politics, expressed while living in Spain, and uncovers the enlightened platform of representative democracy and the moral-patriotic-restorative vision that the author delineated in the pages of El Español.

Aprovechándose de la prensa periódica en Madrid y Sevilla de fines del siglo XVII y principios del XIX, José María Blanco y Crespo cuestionó abiertamente las estructuras socio-polí­ticas de España y se acercó crí­ticamente a los errores de pensamiento y de acción que se habán institucionalizado y que contribuyeron a la decadencia de la nación. Auto-exiliado después de este perí­odo turbulento y de la subsecuente invasión Napoleónica, el ahora nombrado Joseph Blanco White continuó sus esfuerzos periodísticos desde Inglaterra en El Español (1810-1814). El presente artículo traza el desarrollo del acercamiento crí­tico a la polí­tica llevado a cabo por Blanco y expresado mientras vivió en la Península, y descubre la plataforma ilustrada de democracia representativa y la visión moral-patriótica-restorativa que el autor describió en las páginas de El Español.

The sparse scholarship on José Manuel Poveda's feminine heteronym, Alma Rubens, has emphasized the innovative style and racy content of his/her twenty-four prose poems or poemetos. But the heteronymic process as it is revealed in Rubens's debut poem, "Agua profunda y escondida" and the three chronicles in which Poveda introduces and describes Rubens have not been closely analyzed. Because Rubens is imagined as a woman, as sexually androgynous, as object of Poveda's desire, and as the creator of a new poetry, heteronymic embodiment here affords an opportunity for creative expansion and it issues a challenge to stable notions of gender identity and artistic subjectivity.

Shen Congwen, one of the most accomplished modern Chinese writers, is known for his native-soil literary works. In this paper, I study the power and limits of the lyrical mode that characterizes his native-soil writings by making a connection between the aesthetics of nature and gender. I observe that Shen's poetic appropriation of nature and woman-as-nature allows him to create a sensuously decentralized and morally ambiguous lyricism that resists the pull of social realism, the key mode of the May-fourth literature. In many of his short stories, nature images not only help to accentuate vivid psychological activities of female characters, but also add layers of aesthetic unsettledness, opacity, and elasticity to the text. However, Shen's lyrical ambiguity, when examined through his gendered double perspectives of "imaginary femininity" and male authorial subjectivity, is not free of epistemic violence and contradictions that often afflict the narrative representations of the native Other. Shen formulates his (male) authorial subjectivity upon an essentialization of female body and sexuality. My reading of Shenâ's fiction Biancheng (Border Town) and his ethnographic essay "Fenghuang" ("Phoenix Town") shows that as the native woman becomes the spatial marker on the literary map of West Hunan, she is inscribed into the semiotic world of nature and non speech, unable to articulate her subjectivity as a historical and ethical being.

Charles Davis Award for Best Student Convention Presentation(s)

Reviews

Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems,
by Lorna Dee Cervantes
Reviewer: Daniel Shank Cruz

German History in Modern Times. Four Lives of the Nation,
by William W. Hagen. 
Reviewer: Daniel C. Villanueva

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery,
by Annette Kolodny
Reviewer: Rebeccah Bechtold

Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels,
by Richard Locke
Reviewer: Thomas P. Fair

The Deliverance of Other, 
by David Palumbo-Liu
Reviewer: Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Queequegâ's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature,
by Birgit Brander Rasmussen 
Reviewer: Teresa Coronado

Tributary: A novel,
by Barbara Richardson
Reviewer: Laura Pritchett

Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico,
by José David Saldívar
Reviewer: Paul B. Wickelson

Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education,
by Nancy Schniedewind & Mara Sapon-Shevin
Reviewer: Timothy R. Conrad

The Political in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent,
by Theodore F. Sheckels
Reviewer: Alicia Tromp